Feedback wanted
Hi all,
I'm wondering if anyone can give me feedback on a product I've been working on (for a couple of months now) called Isoflow. I've attached a screenshot of where it is now.
Essentially Isoflow is a visualisation tool for web apps. You can use it to build maps of your web app's architecture (with a SimCity-like perspective). It will also be able to show you what's happening in real-time within your architecture (sort of like an event feed where you can see things like how many database read/writes are happening, and which emails are going out of your mail server etc). Here's a screenshot of just the map builder.
I see this being used in presentations (especially to show non-technical people the inner workings of a web app), getting a team altogether on the same page of large apps, and also to onboard new members of a dev team.
My questions would be, how many of you would (if any) find this useful in the real world, and would you pay £8 a month for this SaaS? Also happy to hear any improvements / new features suggestions.
Thanks!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Thanks very much for your reply.
So much to think about in just a few lines!
Where do I start... I've been aware of CloudCraft for a while (only now TotalCloud though, I've taken a look, thanks for listing them), they seem to be focussed on AWS architectures specifically (and they both come with hefty price tags). To be honest, the intention for Isoflow was to be nothing more than an incredible visualisation tool first and foremost (and a competitor to traditional 2D flowchart apps e.g. LucidChart). The aim is to give the user a blank canvas and a paintbrush and see how people use it. If it's AWS architectures people use it for, I'll pimp it out with AWS features. (I realise this is probably a terrible product development process, but very wierdly I'm enjoying building this thing, and I would also pay for it myself).
RE the real-time event feed (I wouldn't go as far as to call it analytics), the system is in place, it's a very basic pinging system over websockets (nothing gets recorded, each ping just gets visualised on the frontend in real-time and then fades into oblivion). The challenge is visualising lots of events at once, (imagine each database read/write being logged)... the notifications queue cycles too fast to make any sense of it! One solution is batching these together, but that's another story.
RE audience, this is, in my opinion, the biggest question mark. Very generally, I'm thinking about devs / devops engineers, and an example scenario would be "As a dev, I want to present how the system is developing at weekly standups to non-technical stakeholders". In that scenario I feel it would be awesome to show the system working in real-time (and start lots of conversation points between technical and non-technical people), hence why I'm including the real-time feature. Again, if it's something people don't use, I will let it die.
I'm in agreement with what you say about diagram automation. Originally I tried experimenting with automated ways to map function calls in apps, (i.e. following the code) but I ended up with a migraine-inducing diagram so huge and with so many connectors that it made me think there needs to be a certain level of human abstraction to get to a diagram that shows meaning. Again if AWS is what people use it for, I will think about automating AWS schemas to visual representations.
Thanks again for your response.